Paintings from 2022
It’s been a minute since I have written anything. Admittedly, I’ve had a hard time getting back into a writing headspace. One of my goals during the 2020 quarantine was to finish at least one of the books that’s been rooting around in my head for years. But it didn’t happen. Basically it’s been a tough nut to crack getting words on to paper. It’s been less difficult putting paint on paper though, which is a lot of what I did last year. Here’s some of those paintings and thoughts/comments on them.
“Content Overdose” by John “Chako” Chakravarty. Watercolor and ink on paper. 20x24 inches. 2022
This was my favorite painting I made last year. It depicts a few rad dudes, contentedly relaxing by the pool on a warm summer day. These visions of MuX are meant to convey an emotion tied to a repeating memory. My hope is that the viewer connects this to a time in their life, whether it be good or bad, to feel a sense of familiarity. The MuX universe is parallel to our own. Not in the way that science fiction celebrity magicians describe the idea of parallel universe. Instead, it’s parallel to ours like books on a shelf. There may be similar characters, themes, rules, and experiences. But they are separate stories that have been told alongside each other.
When I stare at this picture, I can see the pool around my childhood home, the house I lived in on Wilshire, Dre’s pool in my 20’s, and The Johnson’s pool more recently. The literal connections are there, the shape of the pool, my dog chowing down on pizza in the background, the choice of beverages, etc. However, I mostly intended to capture that vibe or feeling of being by the pool, during a powerful bender, as the sun sets on a warm summer day.
“Painted Horse at the Soda Fountain” By John “Chako” Chakravarty 2022, Watercolor and ink on paper. 20x16 inches.
When I started painting the MuX universe, I stayed away from depictions of cowboys and other Southwestern iconography. However, the MuX universe was always intended as a frontier for exploration. Somewhere out in the painted desert, I saw the mixture of antiquated technology mixing with modern amenities. This rad dude is more machine than human; an advanced cybernetic organism powered by nanophysics and connected to the great AI network, sponsored by NicStix. Yet they are surrounded by old tech; payphones, floppy disks and tube televisions. I love the imagery of payphones, especially catching sight of one in the real world. They are like monolithic gravestones connected to an ancient underground nervous system. It takes a bit of bravery to pickup the handset on a public phone these days, they seem unsanitary, or potentially connected to some nefarious dark network. It’s a reminder of how temporary everything is, and how unpredictable the future will be. The more interconnected communication devices has become, the more difficult it has become to communicate. Phones, at their simplest, connect one microphone and speaker to another microphone and speaker through a single wire. But now phones are a supercomputer the size of a calculator. I often picture the things we’ve lost since advancing the phone past payphones. Is it worth it to play tetris on my phone in return for losing honest to goodness prank calls? Is being always reachable worth being constantly bombarded by spam? Is being well informed worth the price of anxiety?
“Salt River Toober and Land Crab” By John “Chako” Chakravarty. Watercolor and ink. 2022. 20x24 inches.
Similar to the feeling of “Content Overdose” this painting was meant to convey the emotion of a memory. This rad dude sits content in their toob, watching the clouds go by. There’s a payphone on the shore, in case the dude needs to get out and chat with anyone. Behind that a massive land crab drags it’s shell along behind it. When I depict a body of water in my paintings, I often use bright, neon colors. Those bright colors are throughout my paintings, so it’s become the theme and aesthetic of them. But it also refers to the use of water in our world. At my local grocery store, there are seven aisles of beverages. Seven aisles of soda, juice, energy drinks, electrolyte infused sports drinks, beer, liquor, wine, and more. There is about ten feet dedicated to water. In the desert, where consumer responsibility means being water conscious, there is a Coca-Cola bottling plant that never slows down. Soon our rivers will run red with Mountain Dew High Voltage. Our waterfalls will cascade with the cool, refreshing taste of Coors Banquet beers. Our jetskis will spew streams of sparkling rose. The idea that humanity can avoid this fate by taking shorter showers, or reducing the sprinklers in the yard is laughable. Being stranded in the desert without water is one of my worst fears. But being stranded in the desert with a fountain that dispenses lukewarm Diet Coke is one of my grandest nightmares.
MuX means Most ultimate eXperience. And the intent of these paintings is to give that to the viewer. I certainly don’t think I’ve attained that status through my art yet, but it’s a moving process. As the Butthole Surfers said, “You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes.” Since art is an extension of the self, that’s true of these paintings also. More enjoyable than creating the art has been finding other people that connect with it. So I hope YOU have connected with the Sonoran Science Fiction paintings that I’ve made.
